2006's SLITHER is a funny throwback to 1950s creature features, cross-pollinating those innocent small-town flicks with the bloodier monster movies of the 80s. It's a good movie to end Horrorfest 2012 on, as it seems to encompass a little bit of everything we've touched on this month. Hell, it even features a clip of TOXIC AVENGER.
Nerd-hero Nathan Fillion stars as a small town sheriff who finds himself fighting alien slugs after a meteor crash lands and infects a local rich guy (Michael Rooker). Rooker's too into his trophy wife (Elizabeth Banks) to willingly infect her in turn, so he preys upon a lonely single mom (Brenda James) who he knows has had a crush on him since they were kids. Meanwhile, Banks suspects something is up with her husband when he mysteriously starts locking parts of the house and growing unsightly deformities on his body.
It turns out these alien slugs can possess a person, turn them into a zombie, and send them marching around town. However, Rooker seems to be the queen-bee and all of the zombie-fied folks flock to him. They all kind of meld together, one by one, until they form a bigger and bigger ever-growing blob with tentacles. I guess the point is to take over Earth.
This all sounds kind of ridiculous, and it is. Luckily, it's played for laughs, and the characters are never too cool or too unrealistic to avoid commenting on how messed s things are. Fillion is particularly good at this sarcastic delivery, maintaining a nice guy charm and not veering into snark-land. Rooker, as always, is a great villain, though I long for the day when he'll be used in some other capacity. Sweet memories of CLIFFHANGER dance in my head ("Season's over, asshole!").
Banks is good, too, in a part that could have been overplayed to the point of parody, but she takes it totally seriously -- she apparently married Rooker for his money, but still feels the need to at least try to be a good wife. This gets more and more exaggerated as Rooker turns into more and more of a monster, but hey -- sometimes real life stuff seems ironically more real when it's blown out of proportion like this.
Throughout all of this, the movie is never boring and never strays too far from its monster movie origins. It's patently absurd, but it knows it and is okay with it.
Okay, now some stats for Horrorfest 2012. As a reminder, this year I stuck with the highest rated flicks on Netflix Watch Instantly that I hadn't already seen.
24 of the movies were in color and 7 were in black and white. 1 was animated. I didn't watch any silent flicks this year, which is kind of a bummer.
21 of the movies were from the US, with 6 from the UK, 3 from Canada, 2 from Germany and 1 each from Hong Kong and Japan. That ads up to over 31 because of co-productions.
This was a more modern Horrorfest than usual, with 7 movies from the 2010s, 6 from the 80s, 5 each from the 70s and 50s, 3 each from the 2000s and 60s and 2 from the 40s.
My least favorite film of the month was probably RODAN.
My 6 favorite in no particular order were:
HOUSE OF THE DEVIL
NIGHT OF THE COMET
THE BLACK SLEEP
THE FOG
THEATRE OF BLOOD
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
Happy Halloween!
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